Seven Years in Tibet

Seven Years in Tibet

By Heinrich Harrer

While reading Seven Years in Tibet, Heinrich Harrer's sublime work of travel literature, I was struck by a disturbing question. Has the epitaph for travel literature already been written?

For centuries, armchair travelers have marveled at the tales of adventurers who have traveled to distant lands. From the works of Marco Polo and Ibn al-Battuta to the invaluable works of Charles Darwin to the amazing stories of Thor Hyerdahl, travel writers have taken readers to places they could only imagine, told stories of exotic people and extraordinary cultures.

But with the relatively recent advent of cheap flights, social media, the Internet and, most devastatingly, globalization, is the era of travel... real exploratory travel... finished? Well, until the advent of interplanetary travel, I think it just might be.

Let introduce the book and then let me explain.

In Seven Years in Tibet, Heinrich Harrer takes us inside one of the most insular cultures ever to exist on this planet. Not only was the Tibet that Harrer visited suspicious of outsiders, it had the luxury of being nestled on the other side of the almost impassable Himalayan mountain chain. When Harrer entered the country in the middle of the Second World War as an escaped POW he became one of only a handful of Europeans who had ever gained access to Tibet. Over his seven years in the country (just in case the title wasn't clear on that) he would meet less than a dozen other Europeans (conversely, I met over a dozen western expats on my first night in taiwan in 2002). There is literally no place on earth left that hasn't felt the impact of Western culture (aka globalization). In that sense, Harrer was given the rare opportunity to see one of the last nations on the planet completely untouched by the Western world prior to the Great Flattening.

The book itself is divided into four parts. The first part deals mainly with Harrer's time in a prison camp in India. As a German on British soil during the early days of World War II he was taken into custody. But he planned and executed his escape and crossed the border into Tibet with the intent of reaching the Japanese lines. The second part of the novel recounts the two years he spent trying to get a foothold in the notoriously insular nation. This part was most interesting to me because it was, by far the most harrowing portion of the book and recounted incidents that could only occur in the duty nowheres of Asia. The third part consists of his first years in Lhasa and the final part is essentially an early biography of the thirteenth Dalai Lama, their friendship and his ultimate flight from Tibet when the Chinese invaded in 1951.

This is travel writing in its purest form. Harrer has no Western crutch, no expat community that has paved the way for his arrival and provided for a nice cushy landing. This is the story of a man who made his way in a nation where he may have been the first of his kind (i.e. German) to ever live in Lhasa. Harrer saw a Tibet that few travelers had seen before and none will ever see again. He saw the pure, unadulterated culture prior to the onslaught of the Chinese invasion and the inevitable incursion of the modern world. And since 99% of the religious buildings in Tibet have been destroyed since the invasion and over 70% of the current population of Lhasa is non-Tibetan, Harrer's work is essentially a eulogy for an entire culture.

Now, I haven't been to Lhasa but I have done my fair bit of travel and, while I still love to do it, I have no misgivings about it. I'm never going to have a unique experience in any of the exotic locales I choose to visit (unless, of course i choose to visit a war zone, which of course I won't). No matter where I go, no matter how far off the beaten path I venture, I am treading on roads well worn by millions of people who have come before me. Every medium sized town in Vietnam and Sri Lanka has a Starbucks. There are fast food outlets in Rangoon and Nairobi. You can buy Bulgari watches at the airport in Ankara and Calcutta and I'm sure if you can't buy a McDonalds Happy Meal in the shadow of the Potala Palace, it's not long in coming.

This incursion has made the notion of travel problematic. If you can experience gourmet Indian cuisine in the comfort of your own home, view the cultural splendors of India from on the television and purchase authentic Indian handicrafts via the Internet why, exactly, would you pay vast quantities of money to fly half way around the globe only to find that Mumbai is a morass of the same 18 fast food chains, coffee shops and clothing outlets you just left? And unless you traveled for a very specific reason (i.e. mountain climbing, surfing, archaeological dig) there is never really much difference between Paris, Pretoria and Phnom Penh. Did you travel for the smell? Because that might be the only thing you couldn't have gotten back home.

With all due respect to Michael Palin, Bill Bryson and Neil Peart, who have written some fabulous travel literature in the past 20 years (focusing on travel with very distinct purposes, I might add), we will never again have a book that represents an introduction to a major nation, city or culture that The Travels of Marco Polo or Seven Years in Tibet was. At the time of publication, Tibet was perhaps the last great unexplored culture on the planet. It's a shame that Harrer's work coincided with its demise (and make no mistake, no amount of Beastie Boys concerts will ever resurrect the Tibetan Nation). The Epilogue to the edition I wrote is a thousand times more heart breaking than the book since Harrer' has had a half century to reflect on the events of his book and see it for what we all know it is, an epitaph.

In that respect, this book is also a cautionary tale for Taiwan, the country I live in (Ten Years in Taiwan?). Taiwan has been the focus of a relentless propaganda campaign since 1949 and while the situation with Tibet doesn't provide exact parallels, there are lessons to be taken for any Taiwanese who cares to listen. The recent self-immolations that have plagued the Tibetan capital represent a desperate endgame that has no happy ending. Is this Taiwan's future should China get the opportunity to act? Let's how for Taiwan (and my) sake we never find out.

Anyway, long story short, Seven Years in Tibet is deserving of the moniker classic travel literature and should be placed on the bookshelf with the other heavyweights in the genre. Perhaps (and lamentably so) at the far right.

(Note: I never saw the Brad Pitt movie)

The White Tiger

The White Tiger

By Aravind Adiga

Happy Canada Day!

And like any red-blooded Canadian citizen, I like to enjoy our nation's birthday by sitting down and writing a blog post about modern Indian literature. This year I have the pleasure of cracking a Moosehead, turning up Blue Rodeo on the stereo and getting down to business with Aravind Adiga's "blazingly savage" debut (and short-listed for the Man Booker Prize) novel The White Tiger. I put those words, "blazingly savage," in quotations because they are not my words but rather those of Neel Mukherjee, reviewer for the Sunday Telegraph. I'm not familiar with Mr. (Mrs.?) Mukherjee's work for the Telegraph but a simple racial profile (i.e. reading his (her?) name off the byline) indicates that he (she?) probably knows significant amount more than me about India, Indian culture and Indian literature.

That's not to say that I'm writing about this novel in a vacuum. Long-term readers of this blog know that I am an avid fan of Indian literature and read as much of it as I can get my hands on. And I don't know it you have noticed or not but I have been reading quite a few recent Man Booker Prize winners and nominees, recently. It hasn't been a conscious thing, but I have been made aware of my recent trend and it's true (I picked up a recent nominee this morning, so expect more in the near future). So, I'm not entirely devoid of opinion on this novel and I'd like to think that my opinion has some weight on this stiflingly hot Canada Day in Asia.

I bring up Mukherjee's words because I cannot think of a more succinct way in which to express my feelings toward this novel. Set in modern day India, Adiga's novel is told from the perspective of Balram who is introduced as an entrepreneur at the onset of the novel. Narrator via a series of letters from Balram to the premier of China, it is revealed that Balram a small-town indian who has work his way out of The Darkness as a driver for Ashok, a local landowner based in Delhi. As driver, Balram is singly endeared, repressed, ignored and abused by his employer, resulting in a complex relationship that culminates in Balram murdering his boss (note: this is not a spoiler as it is mentioned in the first 20 pages of the book). The result is a "blazingly savage" (see I can't help myself) treatise on the injustice of India's caste, the human quest for freedom and the nature of individualism in a collective culture.

On the surface, The White Tiger is a simple (yet effective) examination of the stifling caste system in India and the way in which it maintains and perpetuates itself. Through Balram we are introduced to the knee-jerk servitude of the lower castes and the way in which lower castes are disregarded entirely. In all the novels I have read about India I have never encountered such a naked appraisal of the injustice of the caste system than in The White Tiger. But nowhere in this novel is the injustice more manifest than Adiga's blistering rant on the nature of Indian democracy and the manner in which the ruling castes manipulate elections to their advantage. Scathing stuff.

But for all the ways in which the caste system hinders social mobility in India, there resides within each individual a burning desire for freedom in some form. In this case, it is Balram's desire for freedom from his master's inconsistent and increasingly erratic relationship. Throughout the novel, despite Balram's questionable behavior, the reader finds it difficult to fault Balram in his often wayward quest to find his way out of the intricate web of relationships and obligations that was woven for him since birth.

Which brings us to the theme of individualism. At a young age, Balram is given the moniker of "The White Tiger" by a local luminary touring the schools in the area. In Indian lore, a white tiger is someone who comes around only once in a generation and is different from everyone around them. Despite the fact that his life trajectory seems to follow the median for his particular caste, Balram maintains the notion that he is somehow different from everyone in his village. Is this a partial motive for his later crime? Perhaps, but more telling of his idea that he is different from everyone around him is that the entire novel is a series of letters from Balram to Wen Jiaobao, Premier of China and the leader of the world's most collective culture. What significance is there in Balram, the stalwart white tiger of individualism, in writing to the very antithesis of individualism? Vanity, perhaps. The same confession written to the office of the President of the United States of America would be received with an anticlimactic shrug. Perhaps Balram has an inherent sense of irony.

It should also be noted that aside from these fun themes, there is an underlying current of globalization gone horribly wrong. In a recent blog post I noted that naive protagonists are often better than those in the know simply because it is more entertaining from a reader's perspective to read  a story told from the perspective of someone who knows precious little about the world around them. Despite his recent success, Balram is the poster child for the half-educated child of globalization. In a sense, technology has permeated our culture (and one would presume Indian culture as well) enough to misinform a significant portion of the population about everything from poetry to physics. We see it in America among the adherents of intelligent design and we see it throughout The White Tiger.

This is the novel that Slumdog Millionaire desperately tried to be and failed. That's not a knock on Slumdog Millionaire so much as it's a heap of respect for Adiga's ability to actualize modern India in a way that is both endearing and horrifying at the same time. This novel is unrelentingly ferocious in its depiction of India and its caste system. The White Tiger deserves all of its accolades. If I had somehow read this novel a few Canada Days ago, before Neel Mukherjee, I would have said that The White Tiger is "blazingly savage."

Read it.

Mao's Last Dancer

Mao's Last Dancer

By Li Cunxin

Whenever I read a book blurb that describes a book as "an extraordinary adventure," or a "captivating journey." I am immediately skeptical. These sorts of catch-all descriptions are so commonplace that they have become trite. They are simply rote platitudes used to get something (anything!) that someone (anyone!) said about the book on the front or back cover in an effort to move stock.

Of particular note is the word "captivating." In the world of literary review it has become the ubiquitous term for anyone determined to get their name on the jacket of a book. It has gotten so bad that I will not read a book if it has the word "captivating" anywhere on the cover (I'll excuse its use on the back, otherwise I'd never read any books at all). I have read enough crappy books deemed "captivating" I could fill a truck. Critics and reviewers have rendered the word entirely obsolete.

Well, almost.

Mao's Last Dancer, is the autobiography of Chinese born ballet dancer Li Cunxin. The first half of the book chronicles his childhood living on a peasant commune in China during the reign of Chairman Mao. The story tells of how he was selected (quite possibly at random) at age eleven from a group of local students to study dance at Madame Mao's Arts Academy in Beijing. It recounts his gradual awakening into the world of dance and his indoctrination into the communist system. The second half of the book recounts events that lead to his defection to the west in 1981, his rise to the top of the world of dance and the fallout of the defection on him, his relationships and his family in China. It's a great book, no doubt. But more than anything, this book reaffirmed my faith in the word "captivating."

To me, a captivating book evokes a sleepless night, stealing seconds, not minutes, to read just a few more paragraphs, creating reasons to sit down in waiting areas in order to read a few pages, endangering my relationships with my wife and daughter, reading while walking and all sorts of other pathological behavior that I do not exhibit while reading other books. A captivating book denotes an almost hysterical compulsion to finish the book. It doesn't necessarily mean the book is good, it's just captivating. That describes Mao's Last Dancer perfectly. I desperately needed to know how things turned out. Whether he would ever see his niang and dia again. Whether he would be allowed back into China.

I admit it, I simply could not put this book down. Part of the reason is that Li Cunxin comes across as a genuine, humble man who truly loves his family and is devoted to his career. He seems like the sort of person you'd like to know and the book is written as if he's already met you and is telling you a story over dinner. His story has the ability to make you cry no matter how it is written, and it does, in many places. I admit it.

Also, it's unique. It's one thing to read about life in Maoist China, its another to read one person's account of life inside a commune during the Cultural Revolution. It is quite another to read an account of someone growing up under such oppressive conditions to become one of the world's most famous people in a particular discipline. When you get down to it, Li Cunxin's story is literally one in a billion. To escape Maoist China and become one of the world's great ballet dancers is a astounding. Following his story as he slowly discovered the truth about his own country is fascinating (and at times hilarious).

Don't get me wrong, it's not the best book ever written. I couldn't care less about ballet and I found that when his narrative shifted back to his dancing I couldn't read fast enough to get back to the interesting parts. While ballet is a necessary backdrop to the overall narrative, I think the majority of readers are invested in the story of his upbringing, training, initial impressions of the West and the defection. The consistent talk of his career seemed to betray the spirit of the book as a whole. It was never about the ballet. It was about perseverance and dedication and the ability to get out of an oppressive situation to allow a talent to flourish. I didn't much care whether he left the Houston dance company to join the Australian company. It's inconsequential to the main narrative. But what do I know? I'm an uncultured boor.

But regardless of your views on ballet, Mao's Last Dancer is the very definition of the word captivating. It's the sort of book whose unrelenting narrative begs you to read one more chapter before going to bed. Even if you, like me, don't know the different between ballet and the circus, I dare you to put this book down once you begin.

Or maybe, I dunno, maybe I'm just getting sentimental in my old age.

Note: The word "captivating" does not appear on the cover.

Other books about China:

A Traveler in China
Why China Will Never Rule The World

A Traveller in China

A Traveller in China

By Christina Dodwell

For anyone that is considering traveling in China (or anywhere in central or east Asia for that matter), you would be doing yourself a service by picking up a copy of Christina Dodwell's excellent travel book, A Traveller in China. Although the book is nearing thirty years of age, it is a wealth for information, and anecdotes by one of the world's most intrepid and fearless explorers. Furthermore, unlike many books on the subject of China, Dodwell dedicates the bulk of her journey to the more remote regions of the country rather than the well-worn tourist track of Beijing, Xian, Shanghai and Kunming. The book resounds as much today as it may have when it was first published.

When this book was published in 1985, China was still in the midst of its gradual transition out from the disasters of Maoism and the Cultural Revolution. While it was still very much a cultural and political backwater, the machinations of things to come were already churning under the leadership of Deng, Xiao-Ping. Christina Dodwell provides a candid look at China at a crossroads: the last years prior to its Great Economic Explosion that would roll through the 1990s and continue unabated up until today.

I admire Dodwell's travel technique. She traveled China alone in the early 80s, a time when foreign travelers were a rarity, solo foreign travelers even rarer still, and solo female travelers a virtual non-entity. Having traveled through Asia extensively myself (though not China, I must admit), I can say that Dodwell was never in any real danger among the people, but certainly this trip took a lot of guts. Traveling amongst Chinese populations can be a very lonely experience if you aren't prepared.

Furthermore, Dodwell tends to stray away from the traditional hotel, restaurant, bus, hotel circuit, opting for a more granola approach. She hefts her inflatable canoe along with her and is always keen to put in along a river, lake or stream. She is also keen to stay with local people whenever it is offered, which gives her a keen insight into the lives of some of China's most misunderstood minority groups. And while she is careful not to cross paths with police or other government officials, she makes every attempt to visit places that are still "officially closed" to tourists. Dodwell makes her way to Ju Jie Shan, Lake Er Hai and Tibet.... all closed to tourists in the early 80s. In that respect, Dodwell is an intrepid, fearless explorer who provides a unique perspective on this part of Asia.

Certainly she had the pedigree. Dodwell's grandmother was a journalist during the tumultuous days prior to the Second World War and spent over ten years in China traveling and writing. Dodwell makes some effort to retrace her grandmother's path, starting in Beijing but finds that much of what existed in the 1930s had been destroyed or torn down. In her hunt for footprints left by her family, she is left disappointed.

Despite this constant flux, what Dodwell discovers on her travels through the western and southern provinces (Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, Qinghai, Shaanxi, Yunnan, Gansu and Tibet... not in that order) is a land that is not far removed from the 19th (or 18th, or 17th) century. Uighur people living in yurts, Hui people hunting and cultivating in their traditional ways, Miao people sporting their traditional dress and Tibetans dining on yak meat stew (with a bit too much animal hair). The presence and influence of the Han Chinese at the time of writing was still very much tenuous. This book was written long before the Chinese government got vigilant about relocating hordes of Han settlers into these territories in an effort to Sinicize them, a strategy that I am lead to believe is working, much to the detriment of these cultures. To be certain, Dodwell does encounter Han racism along the way. A truck driver who picks her up on the road to Lhasa is puzzled as to why she might want to spend time with Tibetans, calling them dirty and lazy.

Dodwell doesn't get much involved in editorializing her travels and never falls into the trap of cultural relativism, which is refreshing considering the majority of books I have read over the past few years on the subject of China have been largely condescending. She offers some cursory history and other essential information if it pertains to her travels but rarely strays from her own travelogue. She does, however, say enough to allow her readers to formulate their own opinions. That's a fine line, to say the least, and she walks it well, although she did make me laugh heartily when she made reference to a fellow European's fashion choices:

"The girl was wearing short shorts, which many of the younger Western travelers in China seem to wear, not realizing how this offends the local people's customs. What kind of Chinese woman would walk with bare thighs in public?"

Oh boy, Ms. Dodwell, how times change. The question today would read: "What self-respecting Chinese girl doesn't own at least two dozen pair of ultra-revealing short shorts and a multitude of miniskirts that leave little to the imagination?" I got a kick out of that line so much so that I woke my (Taiwanese) wife up just to share it with her. She failed to see the humor at 1:30am. Too bad, I guffawed.

While much of the book focuses on her travels through the vast expanse of nature in China's western provinces, paddling the lakes and rivers in and around the Tienshan Mountain Range and the Tibetan Plateau, it is the time she spends with the people that makes this book timeless. She is invited into yurts, eats everything that is offered to her, travels by horse, donkey, mule and camel and generally has a knack for familiarizing herself with shy communities. Her experiences truly feel as if they were from another century. It is a virtual certainty that she encountered communities who had never seen white people before (it is suspected that Dodwell is the first outsider to ever witness the Dragon Boat races at Lake Er Hai). There's something to say for that.

For those who are interested in the rapid transformation happening in China since the early 80s, this book offers an interesting bookend to the rise of China. It's a solo traveler's account of the country on the eve of major social and economic change. It is extraordinary to read about the cultural and economic values of China prior to the current variation. What's more, due to the rapid influx of Han people into these far flung areas has turned many of these populations into minorities in their own land. We only need to look at the state of unrest and displeasure in Xinjiang and Tibet to see the growing concern over the future of these populations.

In this respect, A Traveller in China is a book that couldn't and wouldn't get written today, which is a shame. It's the sort of book that reminds the reader of the travelogues of explorers such as Ibn Battuta or Stanley or Livingstone. Travelers who are treading new ground, seeing things from an stranger's perspective for the first time. In 2012, there are so vary few places and communities left on the planet untouched or unseen. It's awesome that Dodwell had the chance to cover ground so few outsiders had seen since (dare I say) the days of Marco Polo.

What's more, Dodwell has incited within me the first inclinations to travel in China, a country I had previously had no interest in visiting. I only fear that much like her attempts to retrace the travels of her grandmother, I would find that much of what she wrote about has been altered beyond recognition. Shame.

Classic travel literature. Highly recommended.

Formosa: Licensed Revolution and the Home Rule Movement, 1895 - 1945

Formosa: Licensed Revolution and the Home Rule Movement, 1895 - 1945

By George Kerr

Apologies. There doesn't seem to exist a cover for this particular tome. You'll have to do with a map instead.

For anyone out there who is an not expert on (or even familiar with) the history of Taiwan and the far east, George Kerr is a rock star in the genre. Kerr is the author of the now legendary Formosa Betrayed and a giant in the field of Taiwanese history during Japanese occupation, the handover to KMT forces in 1945 and the subsequent invasion of KMT loyalists in 1949. In short, if you're into Taiwan, George Kerr is your man.

Formosa: Licensed Revolution and the Home Rule Movement, 1895-1945 is a definitive overview of Taiwan during its time as a Japanese colony. Kerr spends a lot of time setting up the geopolitical reasonings for the annexation and colonization of Taiwan by the Japanese and their attempts (albeit uneven) to assimilate the Taiwanese populace into the "greater Japanese empire."

Kerr divides the book neatly into decades beginning with a pleasant overview of Taiwan history before the Japanese occupation. He is careful to point out that never once in the years preceding Japanese control did China have control over the entire island nor where they especially concerned with governing it. In fact, when control of Taiwan was shifted from Imperial China to Japan following the signing of the Treaty of Shimonoseki, it seemed as though China was glad to be rid of the burdensome island. To put it more bluntly, China's current claims on the island of Taiwan are an historical fabrication. China's control and interest in Taiwan before 1895 was cursory at best and more likely leaned toward indifferent.

As for Japan, they were keen to add a colony. Taiwan was an image boost for the emerging power and a global showcase, a way in which Japan could demonstrate their unique ability to govern and rule foreign a colony. They leapt into the mission in earnest, modernizing Taiwan and laying the essential infrastructure that would help the ruling Chiang family catapult Taiwan's economy into the stratosphere in the late 1970s.

However,ended up making many of the same mistakes their western counterparts made in other parts of the world, especially in their dealings with the Taiwanese aboriginal people. While governing the Chinese population was relatively smooth, especially in and around the new metropolis of Taipei, the resources that Japan so sorely coveted lay in the mountainous interior, the ancestral home of Taiwan's Atayal and Bunun populations, both of which would be a consistent thorn in the side of the Japanese occupiers from day one. Japan showed little deftness in dealing with these populations and relations with the tribes remained volatile and often violent (head-hunting remained a cultural mainstay among the aboriginals well into the 1930s, much to the dismay of Japanese policemen stationed in the mountains along the east coast). By the onset of the Sino-Japanese War in the mid 30s, Taiwan was still only nominally Japan-ized and the population's tolerance of the Japanese colonists had more to do with them not being Chinese. Japan was bad, but not as bad as China. In the end, Taiwanese just wanted to be left alone.

Kerr does a wonderful job of introducing the major players on the island during the occupation from hard line Governor General Kodama Gentaro, uber-builder Nitobe Inazo to the forward thinking Sakuma Samata whose lenient policies came closest to building a real and working relationship between crown and colony. Kerr paints the occupying Japanese as more nuanced and complicated than simply a trigger-happy whip-wielding force brow-beating a population on a whim. In fact, the political and social climate, especially during the early years of the Japanese occupation (read: Sakuma's time as Governor General) was such that a very health home rule movement was allowed to ferment and gain momentum.

Under the nominal leadership of Lin Hsien-Tang, a prevailing zeitgeist manifested among the small but influential sphere of Taiwanese intellectuals in Taipei and other major cities and while Taiwan only gained full representation in the Japanese Diet during the waning days of the Second World War, the Home Rule Movement did garner some very notable successes along the way, namely free and open elections (rigged by the Japanese, of course), a more lenient policy toward the aboriginals (after the Musha Rebellion) and the Kominika, a period of real social and political detente between Japan and Taiwan.

While the political and social history in this book is great, where this book really excels is its ability to paint a vivid picture of life on the island during the half-century of Japanese rule. Kerr takes the reader into the homes and schools of average Taiwanese. He depicts the lives of east coast aboriginals and middle class Taiwanese merchants. He discusses the differences between the Hakka and Hoklo populations and the one can practically small the salt in the air as he describes the vibrant trade between Taiwan's west coast than Fuchian province on the other side of the Taiwan Strait, something that a current native of Taiwan would never understand. Kerr really nails the mixed feelings among the Taiwanese in relation to their colonizers. On the one hand, the Japanese brought modernity to the island in a way that the Chinese could never have done, but on the other hand... they weren't Taiwanese.

For anyone remotely interested in the greater history of Asia in the 20th century, this book is essential reading. It lays all sorts of framework and back story to many of the current issues currently plaguing this part of the world and hints at the travesty that would occur after Japan relinquished the island following their surrender to American forces in 1945. It is a balanced overview of an often overlooked (both in Taiwan and the rest of the world) era in Asian history.

Good book.

Why China Will Never Rule the World: Travels in the Two Chinas

Why China Will Never Rule The World: Travels in the Two Chinas

By Troy Parfitt

This is actually two books in one.

Good and bad.

At its best, Parfitt has written a readable, often witty account of his travels through China and Taiwan. His prose is decidedly readable and I found the book difficult to put down once I settled in. Each chapter catalogues a particular leg of the journey and provides fascinating historical subtext that fits the narrative. Some of the highlights include profiles of both Chiang Kai-Chek and Mao Zedong, a riveting account of cannibalism during the cultural revolution and the revolting account of Chen Chin-hsing, Taiwan's most notorious criminal. His travels include stops in Hong Kong, Macao, Lhasa, Shanghai, Harbin, Beijing, Chongqing, Kunming and Xiamen in china and virtually everywhere (except, mysteriously, Kaohsiung) in Taiwan over a span of a few years. The breadth of travel gives Parfitt a unique perspective on the wider Chinese world.

Parfitt pulls absolutely no punches when it comes to what he sees as the deficiencies inherent in Chinese culture. He refuses to accept the "you just don't understand the Chinese way of life" argument that gets bandied about by Sino-apologists (both Chinese and Western). He seems little interested in accepting Confucian ideals, communist rhetoric and the over-used "5000 years of tradition can't be wrong" argument. Instead, he attacks it head on and often comes to very erudite conclusions, many of which I have arrived as well (especially on the third of the book that pertains to Taiwan). I appreciate the no-holds-barred approach to writing and I got the feeling that if this book had been about 100 pages shorter, it would have been a really good book.

Unfortunately it's not....

Well, not entirely....

At its worst, Parfitt has written a nit-picky tract that seems to hold no real purpose beyond vilifying two nations of people. I felt like he could have written a similar book about Canadians or Finnish people or the Masai tribe. It's easy (if not cathartic) to be critical. If he had stuck to his larger, more sweeping conclusions and left his day-to-day irritants out it would have struck a grander chord. The ninth time he complains about being solicited for a massage in the middle of the night I just wanted to grab him and tell him to unplug his damned phone and quit complaining about non-issues. It lessened the impact of his valid conclusions.

Indeed, much of his writing comes across as an exhaustive rant against China (and sometimes Taiwan) which left a slightly foul taste in the my mouth. I understand that it is difficult to write a book such as this without falling foul of the politically correct crowd (of which I am not a member). But there are moments in this book where I found Parfitt flirting far too close to the line of what is acceptable to print and what should be better left unsaid. Parfitt is a classic example of an author lacking in subtlety. I realize that this book was aiming for the jugular, but there are a few instances that felt as if he was hitting below the belt.

Ofttimes, I found that Parfitt allowed his subject matter to get away from him and he allowed far too much emotion to seep into his narrative. As someone who, in a former life, worked in the publishing industry, I wonder about his editorial process. His editor was either unqualified or entirely unfamiliar with the subject matter. A good editor would have checked his emotional tirades and reigned in his rants (sorry if you read this Troy Parfitt's editor).

Overall, I recommend this book, but with a caveat. If you only plan to ever read one book about traveling through China and Taiwan, don't bother with this one. It's hardly objective. But if the subjects of China and Taiwan are of particular interest to you, it's worth the read. As an example of one man's journey through this part of the world and his frustration, it deserves a place among the growing bibliography of travel literature on the subject of the Chinese world.

In the beginning Parfitt implies that because he has no vested interest in China, his take on the subject would not be skewed by agenda. He's but a simple English teacher who lived and worked in Taipei who wanted to see for himself the rise of a global player. As a long-time resident of Taiwan I must challenge this notion. It is really difficult to live in Taiwan for an extended period of time (and be as well read as Parfitt seems to be) without having some preconceived notions about the Mainland. It's simply not possible.

In the end, I didn't expect any clear answer as to why China will never rule the world and I didn't get one. You won't get one either, but you'll probably enjoy a lot of the stories along the way. For anyone who has spent any time living inside the Chinese world, there will be much in this book to make you nod in agreement, and just as much that will make you furrow your brow in consternation.